Oops, that wasn’t a scam!

This one hurts a little.

We've all gotten scammy-looking toll payment texts. Most of the time, they're fakes. But one California driver found out the hard way that ignoring them isn't always safe.

USA Today tells the story of a woman who, like many of us, started receiving text messages warning her about overdue toll payments. She assumed they were bogus and deleted them. I've done the same. But in her case, they were legitimate. Ignoring them led to her real toll account being deactivated and could have landed her in even bigger trouble with the local toll authority.

That's the absolutely maddening part: spammers have made the channel so toxic that people can't tell the good from the bad; can't tell if a text warning is fake, or real.

I'm trying to at least keep this post prescriptive and useful, so let's answer the question: What should you do if you find yourself in the same spot? Here's the logic I'd apply:

• If the message claims to be about a toll agency you actually use, maybe it's legit. But don't click the link, unless you really know what you're doing. Instead, log in directly to your official toll account website or app to check your balance and ensure that your account is in good standing.
• Compare the sender's number with past legitimate alerts you've received. Do prior numbers from the same sender suggest that the message could be legit?
• Watch for inconsistencies: wrong state, wrong agency, generic wording. In the past, I would have added "threatening language" here, too. Now, I'm not so sure.
• If you can, set up official app push notifications. They're probably harder to spoof than random SMS.

And note the obvious red flags: if you live in Baltimore and the warning claims to be about toll roads in Texas, that's not your bill. Messages from long, non-shortcode numbers, or random foreign phone numbers (in my experience, +44/UK and +63/China seemed popular) are another big sign it's a scam.

It all circles back to a familiar problem. This is the same struggle email has had for decades: when bad actors abuse the medium, they ruin trust in the whole channel. SMS is now heading down that same road, leaving us second-guessing legitimate notifications.

Until mobile carriers and platforms build stronger sender reputation and filtering systems, people are stuck playing an awkward guessing game. And sometimes, like Ashley discovered, guessing wrong hurts. 

There, but for the noodly appendage of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, go I. Meaning that it's just random chance that it wasn't me falling into this trap; I could totally see myself doing this.